Last year Goodyear city council increased your primary property tax rate by 23.7%.

According to Goodyear’s own definition, primary property tax is used to pay for general government, which is primarily the General Fund. So if Goodyear has been managing your money so well, why have they needed to increase the primary property tax rate? Answer, to pay for more government.

They will tell you you won’t notice it because they’ve been doing it to “recover” property taxes due to the drop in property valuations over the past few years*. But if you check the budgeted primary property tax levy, or the total dollars budgeted to be collected from taxpayers since 2008 which is on page 244 of the most recent GY budget book, you will see that the total collected has risen by over 50%. Here is page 244 ( pg 2440001 ) of last year’s budget book.

In 2008 the primary property tax levy was budgeted at $4.17 million and last year it was up to $6.3 million. A whopping 51.1% increase! Goodyear city council doesn’t want to reduce their spending like you have had to do during these economic hard times so they just send you the bill. That way they can continue spending and keep all of their “stakeholders” like union PACs, developers, foreign companies, and city employees happy.

And what do you think will happen when property values start to recover? Do you think they’ll reduce the primary property tax rate like they have done with the “temporary” food tax? What planet have you been staying on? When that happens your elected officials will start patting themselves on the back and tell you that, “our careful fiscal management policies have led us to the current surpluses which we have now realized and which we will now proceed to SPEND!”

From Your Pocket to Theirs

The new budget gives Goodyear employees a 2.5% salary increase or over $1 million of your money each year going forward. They’ve added new employees including an assistant to the mayor and council. And of course they’ll all have to take tens of thousands of dollar trips to DC to hob nob with other politicians. Georgia Trip. Council Trips

And as a result of Goodyear city council awarding well over $5 million in corporate welfare over the past two years, there goes more of your property tax increase. They’re even paying a developer $500,000 so he does not have to fund a new sewer pipe to Dick’s Sporting Goods. And the developer is the one benefiting most from Dick’s going in.
Here are my estimates of the corporate giveaways thus far;
Sub Zero (Bakke Family Owned) $780,000
SunTek (Chinese) $665,000
Schoeller Arca (Swedish) $600,000
Dick’s $1,500,000
St. Gobain (French) $700,000

* In principle, I don’t object to increasing property taxes to make up for valuation short falls to a point, but 20% year after year is way out of line. Especially when Goodyear has never reduced their spending over this time. Not only that, this recession has been going on for several years now and many homeowners have not only lost their jobs but also their home equity and in many cases that means their planned next egg.